If the Rhode Island ACLU could tap any two figures to headline its 50th anniversary event, it might choose Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. And so it has.

William Hutchinson, Rhode Island College professor emeritus and actor, and Marilyn Meardon, storyteller and actor, will play the eminent Rhode Islanders, joining a religion scholar and attorneys in a panel discussion on the separation of church and state.

"Free to Believe: Defending Religious Freedom in Rhode Island" will take place September 24 at 7 pm at a church founded by Williams in 1638: the First Baptist Church in America, 75 North Main Street, Providence. Admission is free.

Local attorneys who brought landmark church/state cases before the federal Supreme Court will discuss the history and legal positions of the American Civil Liberties Union on the subject, as well as what the US Constitution has to say. Moderating the discussion will be Stephen Marini, professor of religion at Wellesley College, and also participating will be Brown University chaplain Rev. Janet Cooper-Nelson.

There have been two cases on the subject in Rhode Island successfully brought before the US Supreme Court. In 1990, in Yang v. Sturner, the Court ruled in favor of a Hmong family whose son was autopsied despite their religious beliefs. Two years later, in Weisman v. Lee, a public school's practice of incorporating an invocation and benediction into their graduation ceremony was ruled unconstitutional.

But whatever the jurisprudence, the separation of church and state remains contested ground.

The First Amendment to the Constitution instructs Congress to "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

"The phrasing is ambiguous," said Marini. "No one quite knows what 'respecting' means. And 'establishment of religion' is taken to mean the government working as an agency to promote the exclusive privilege of one religion over at the other; or any religion over another; or religion over non-religion, or vice versa. It's a very broadened kind of cumbersome category.

"Any time a state, for example — we got a lot of these lately — either a state agency or county or town, fires someone because they're supposed to work on Saturday but they observe the Sabbath on Saturday, that becomes 'establishment,' because you're imposing an orthodoxy on people," he said.

He continued. "And then you get, in places like Kansas, the red zone of the country, arguments that the teaching of evolution in public schools is the imposition of a secular religion on the citizens of the state, and they have sued to stop it on religious grounds, on establishment grounds. So it's a category that tends to be used a lot of different ways."

Frankly, the Founding Fathers could have been clearer.

"The logic of the amendment is the problem," Marini said. "The one clause is the inverse of the other. It doesn't always make sense then, when a case comes along, which clause should we apply; do they contradict each other. It's very oddly phrased, the way the founders did."

The human condition In the ambitious program they will perform this weekend (November 20 and 21 at Rhode Island College), members of Fusionworks Dance Company will premiere three pieces that look at the human condition from several perspectives.

Airing it out New York painter Eve Aschheim has said that she uses geometry in her abstractions "to 'think about' the intersection of nature and cityscape. My works might suggest the chaotic geometry of the city, the expectant stillness of air, the tenuous balance of a wire line against a building."

Two sides of life "I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist," the Pop artist Andy Warhol wrote in 1975. "Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."

Heart keeps beating Storytelling is largely about character, and writer Thomas Cobb came up with a doozy when he conceived Bad Blake.

Dynamic duo Faculty exhibitions tend to be hodgepodges, no matter how prestigious the school. But "Sabbatical Exhibition" is a delightful exception.

Open to interpretation For decades, abstraction dominated avant-garde discourse, as painters worked to break art down to its basic elements, stripping away more and more of what seemed necessary to a painting, and then stripping away even more.

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MYTHS AND DREAMS | September 24, 2014 This play stringings together bedtime stories and fevered hallucinations.

GENDER BENDERS | September 17, 2014 Gender confusion has probably been around for as long as gender conflicts.

SIMONE'S | September 17, 2014 In the Rhode Island tradition of giving directions like “it’s where the coffee milk factory used to be,” Simone’s is located where Not Your Average Bar & Grille and the ice cream shop Supreme Dairy used to be.